Skills and knowledge are fast becoming the critical element of the economic development mix and a cornerstone to sustaining vibrant and competitive regional and national economies.

Already for inward investment professionals, skills are the single most important location selection driver for attracting new business facilities. With an increasing focus on knowledge clusters, cluster specialists and regional planners also now need to know accurately what their skills base is and how it compares.

The Location Skills Audit © enables local, regional and national governments to to use powerful intelligence in their skills.  At a very practical and operational level, this data is used by our clients to work with multi-nationals and large investors making location decisions. It allows companies to compare operations nationally or internationally, providing rich and reliable data on the availability of skilled workers, excluding full-time students. We look at hard-to-find skills amongst both the employed and unemployed population.

This unique data allows robust comparisons between regions and countries – it is the first skills data of its kind that gives a full and comparable evaluation of the knowledge base in any given economy as opposed to the fragmented picture provided by many industry surveys and government statistics. We enable top management to be confident in their business expansion activity by assessing the skills performance of any locality or country being evaluated.  We enable government clients to be ahead in an increasingly competitive environment through the identification of the labour pool's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.